Peter Tatchell is a human rights campaigner, and a member of the queer rights group OutRage! and the left wing of the Green party. He is the Green Party's parliamentary candidate for Oxford East.

His key political inspirations are Mahatma Gandhi, Sylvia Pankhurst, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1952, he began campaigning for human rights in 1967, aged 15. His first campaign was against the death penalty, followed by campaigns in support of Aboriginal rights and in opposition to the draft and the Australian and US war against the people of Vietnam.

In 1969, on realising he was gay, the struggle for queer freedom became an increasing focus of his activism.

After moving to London in 1971, he became a leading activist in the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), organising sit-ins at pubs that refused to serve "poofs" and protests against police harassment and the medical classification of homosexuality as an illness.

Two years later, in East Berlin, he was arrested and interrogated by the secret police - the Stasi - after staging the first ever gay rights protest in a communist country.

He stood as the Labour candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey byelection, but was defeated after some homophobic election campaigning.

In 1987, he launched the world's first organisation dedicated todefending the human rights of people with HIV, the UK Aids VigilOrganisation (UKAVO). In 1988, the UKAVO persuaded the World Health Minister's Summit on Aids to issue a declaration opposing government repression and discrimination against people with HIV.

A long-time anti-apartheid activist, his lobbying of the ANC in 1987 contributed to it renouncing homophobia and making its first public commitment to lesbian and gay human rights. Later, together with others, he helped persuade the ANC to include a ban on anti-gay discrimination in the post-apartheid constitution.

After playing a prominent role in the London chapter of the Aids activist group ACT UP, in 1990 he helped found the radical queer rights direct action movement OutRage!.

Most notoriously, in 1994, Peter Tatchell and OutRage! outed 10 Church of England bishops and called on them to "tell the truth" about their sexuality, accusing them of hypocrisy and homophobia for publicly supporting anti-gay policies, while privately having homosexual affairs. This led to him being denounced in parliament and the press as a "homosexual terrorist" and "public enemy number one".

Four years later, he interrupted the Archbishop of Canterbury's Eastersermon in Canterbury Cathedral, condemning the archbishop, Dr George Carey's advocacy of discrimination against lesbians and gay men.

The following year, 1999, in central London, he and three OutRage! colleagues ambushed the motorcade of the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, and made a citizen's arrest of the president on charges of torture and other human rights abuses.

He attempted another citizen's arrest of Mr Mugabe in Brussels in March 2001, which resulted in him being beaten unconscious by the president's bodyguards.

In 2002, he bought an unsuccessful legal action in the British courts for the arrest of the former US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, on charges of war crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Peter Tatchell campaigns for the independence of the Western Sahara, Palestine and West Papua, and supports the struggles for democracy and human rights in Iran and Iraq. He opposes ID cards, nuclear weapons and energy and the erosion of civil liberties by draconian anti-terror laws. He advocates a single, comprehensive, all-inclusive Equal Rights Act to harmonise the uneven patchwork of equality legislation.

He has proposed an internationally-binding UN human rights convention, enforceable through both national courts and the world court; a permanent rapid-reaction UN peacekeeping force with authority to intervene to stop genocide and war crimes and global agreement to cut military spending by 10% to fund the eradication of hunger, disease, illiteracy, unemployment and homelessness.

PeterTatchell is the author of six books, including Democratic Defence - A Non-Nuclear Alternative (Heretic Books/GMP) and We Don't Want To March Straight - Masculinity, Queers & The Military (Cassell).